Climate Change: Migration and Economy

Climate change poses a dire threat to global stability, economic prosperity and livelihoods of millions of people around the world. Today, it is certain that living conditions in multiple regions will significantly deteriorate due to extreme temperatures, rising sea levels, and recurrent extreme weather events. The pessimistic economic prospects will force many to migrate, exacerbating social and economic challenges in both sending and destination countries. However, the bulk of climate-induced inequality might come from immobile individuals, as they will have to suffer damages caused by climate change.
In this project, we plan to uncover the impact of climate change on economies, societies and migration movements of people over the 21st century. We take three major steps to achieve our goal. First, we will collect detailed data on global migration movements across administrative units for multiple individual types over 1990-2020, imputing the missing data using advanced econometric methods fed with Gallup survey and big data. Second, we construct a theoretical model of the world economy that allow us to answer some of the pressing questions related to climate-induced migration and its macroeconomic consequences. The novelty of our approach is twofold. Not only will we identify and project dynamic migration costs of migration that differ across all socio-demographic individual groups, but also we will incorporate spatial correlations of individual preferences towards destinations by implementing a nested logit model of utility maximization.
These two steps, along with many other upgrades relative to the previous version of the model, will result in a most advanced tool to project climate-induced migration over the 21st century at all spatial scales to date. The final part of the project includes running several policy-oriented quantifications of climate adaptation policies: targeting liberalizations of mobility costs, irrigation infrastructure, and focusing on labor training in Senegal.
Along with excellent top-tier scientific publications, this project aspires to generate a significant societal impact. First, we will build an open access online data platform within which all results of the model simulations will be available to visualize and download. Second, we will publish a series of policy briefs summarizing key findings, and we will organize a series of consultations with NGOs, global institutions and political stakeholders. Finally, we will close the project with a multidisciplinary conference joining scientists and policymakers in discussions about the future of climate migration.